


Buying Time

by missus_e



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Humor, Comedy, Eventual Romance, F/M, Guilt, Humor, Memory Loss, Romance, Season 2 Theory, Spoilers, robot arm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-19
Updated: 2014-05-30
Packaged: 2018-01-25 18:40:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1658492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missus_e/pseuds/missus_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Fitz tells her he doesn't remember anything about being trapped, Simmons is relieved. She has no intention of telling him, at least not until she's sure of how she feels. But how long can her conscience allow her to keep his memory hostage?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

In a deep down, truly horrible way she's actually more relieved when he tells her he doesn't remember than she was when he woke up. The smile that blooms on her face freezes as soon as the guilt catches up with the overwhelming sense of dodging a bullet. Fitz asks her just what is so funny about memory loss, who knows what kind of valuable brain tissue has been irrevocably damaged? She pats his hand and tells him that she's sure it's fine, although she can't help but add that there's still a 23% chance that he'll suffer from brain damage at this point in his recovery. He looks at her with bewilderment, like that's not comforting, why did you say that? And Skye makes a crack about Simmons, always honest to a fault, and now more than ever Simmons knows that's not true. 

Skye is the fist to bring up his arm. Fitz looks at his lifeless limb, resting by his side on the sterilized white hospital sheets. "Well I've a few ideas. I want to draw up a few rough blueprints but the doctor took away my papers and pens."

Simmons blinks. "Why?" 

"They want me to rest." 

"Well that's just stupid, how is solving a problem not restful?"

"That's what I said!" Fitz vehemently agrees. "They keep showing me these prosthetics, but they're all so outdated. One of them was actually the one we invented."

"The Mark Hamil 2000? But that's at least two year old!" 

"Exactly my point." 

"Oh for goodness sakes," Jemma mutters as she reaches into her satchel and pulls out her tablet. "If you want something done right..."

The reunited partners don't even notice when Skye excuses herself to a place less inhabited by talk of sinews and electric pulses. This pursuit, this feeling, is the best thing Simmons has felt since before they found out Ward was a Hydra agent. They talk about neurological connections, different dexterity functions, and she almost allows herself to forget they're making this arm _for Fitz_. 

Evening finds Simmons reclining in a hospital chair with her tablet in her lap, working in silence. The doctors were right when they said Fitz had to rest. Three hours of constant brainstorming had triggered a massive headache, and Jemma had insisted they take a break. Over Chinese take-away she filled him in on what happened while he was hospitalized. Coulson was the new leader of S.H.E.I.L.D. This meant they all had received major promotions, but since the organization now consisted of around a hundred agents, this wasn't as big a deal as it should have been. 

"Still," Simmons insisted. "It's an exciting opportunity. Imagine designing combat gear for Captain America."

She told him how Garret had been defeated, and how Ward was locked away, rethinking his life choices. She almost choked on her chow mein when he asked her just how they had escaped that box at the bottom of the ocean. "Oh you know," she'd said. "You did something brilliant, and then I dragged you to the top."

She sits there now, glancing up every once in a while to make sure he's asleep. She could have told him the truth when he asked. How seconds before he pressed the Big Red Button that was only supposed to save her, he had confessed that she was more than friend to him. How she felt the lightest brush of his lips on her cheek. How he sacrificed himself for her. How she's not sure she can repay him for what he's done.

"Jemma?" 

She quickly sits up in her chair. "What is it?"

"Is there any way we can just stick a chip on my spine and use that to control my arm?" He grin is wry, sleepy. "I just don't wanna throw away a perfectly good limb."

She swallows hard, but there's nothing there to swallow.  "It's... It's impossible Fitz. When your brain lost it's oxygen your body went into shock. Any part of your system that was supposed to repair your arm had to work to keep the rest of you alive, and since your brain considered your heart more important-"  

"Okay."

She doesn't hear him. "At this point any kind of stimulation we could give it would only make it move. We can't bring it back to life anymore than Frankenstein could use lightening to give the Creature-" 

"Okay, I get it!"

She definitely hears him this time. 

He doesn't say anything else for the rest of the night. Simmons hates herself for being the bearer of bad news, especially when-

But she's already spent enough time agonizing over her confused feelings before he woke up. There's a job to be done now. The rest of it will work itself out. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, I'm not a scientist. Also I'm not entirely sure how to google for the information I needed in this post.
> 
> If any of you cool kids have information, links, or even just good ideas let me know!
> 
> Reviews are appreciated!


	2. Winning First

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A rather introspective chapter this one, but hopefully y'all won't mind too much.

His new arm is a masterpiece, a veritable eighth wonder of the world, and they're both stupidly proud of it. Fitz keeps showing off and doing tricks with it: super dexterity, incredible strength, capable of touching any martial and collecting the data on it instantly. Simmons catches him showing Triplett its indestructibility with a blow-torch in the hanger and twists his ear for it. High-sensitivity synthetic skin grafts don't just grow on trees after all.

In a strange way their job description hasn't changed much. They do surveillance on suspicious persons, rescue S.H.E.I.L.D. loyalists from tricky situations, inspect alien technology. It almost feels like nothing has changed, except of course that's not true. Nothing stays the same forever, Simmons knows that. 

Except every day Simmons prays to a deity she doesn't believe in that Fitz never remembers what happened in that box. 

It's not a constant hovering thought; she's too busy to brood over boys and confused feelings. It always appears at the most unexpected times: when he's straightening his tie, when he walks away from her in frustration because it's not _his_ calculations that are wrong after all, when they find something new and smile at each other for just a second too long. 

_He would have died for you._  
 _He loves you.  
_ _Do you love him?_

She knows there is a logical response to all of these thoughts. Yes, Fitz would have died for her, but she gladly would do the same. 

And he never said he loved her, only that she was more than a friend. Yes, she notices the lingering looks and the bright smiles more often lately. The memory loss didn't take his feelings away (did she wish it had?), only the moment where he'd put the ball firmly in her court. 

Does she love him? Of course she does. But loving Fitz and dating Fitz are two entirely different things. Loving is easy. Being in a committed relationship is not. 

Over time the thoughts become impervious to logic. They stay in the dark, growing like mold in the back walls of her mind. 

_He would have died for you._  
 _He loves you.  
_ _Do you love him?_

They used to race each other to finish the daily sudoku puzzles in the Academy paper. The two of them were evenly matched, not that either would admit it. One day Fitz had gotten distracted from the puzzle by an annoying colleague who wanted to argue about how Tony Stark could engineer his suit to collapse into an old Nokia cell phone. The argument had only ended when Simmons shouted "Done!" and Fitz was now consumed with the case that she was a sneaky little cheat. She'd shrugged at him. "I got to the end first."

It's only a matter of time before she gets to the end of this puzzle. Time that she has. 

As long as he doesn't remember he finished first. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please review!


	3. A Prank

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Friday! Here is some friendship fluff that has very little to do with the plot, but there will be more this weekend. Promise.

"This is not a good idea," Simmons announces. 

Skye shrugs. "I think it'd be fun. I'd like to see Agent Triplett act a little trippy."

The scientists simultaneously roll their eyes. 

"You didn't have a problem with pranking Skye," Fitz reminds his partner with crossed arms and hushed tones. 

"Wait, what?"

"Skye was an easy target," Simmons retorts. 

"Hey!"

"And she's not a trained field agent capable of snapping your neck as soon as sneezing." 

"Hang on now! I am no easy target, alright?" Skye says. "And also, when did you guys prank me?" 

"About a month after you got here," Simmons answers.  

"I rigged a mop in the utility closet to scare you," Fitz boasts. 

"A broom in a utility closet? That's it?" Skye shakes her head. "Oh my poor children.No wonder you need me." 

"I still think this is a bad idea," Simmons says. 

The hacker snorts. "You just don't want us bothering your boyfriend."

"He's not my boyfriend," Jemma says a little too quickly. She glances at Fitz. He's pacing back and forth, deep in thought, flexing the fingers of his robotic arm. He does that a lot, like he's still not used to it. They designed it to have as seamless an interface as possible, but the fact that it's there, that it isn't _his arm_ still seems to nag him. 

"It's gotta be good though," he muses. "Simmons is right, he's no spring chicken." 

"Yeah, it's not like the shaving cream in the hand trick is gonna work on him," Skye says with a smirk.  

"Hey! I'd like to see you get pranked by Melinda May and not fall for it!"

 "It was a pretty simple trick Fitz."

 He takes a moment to make a face at her before re-focusing. "Less talk about my weaknesses, more talk about Tripp's."

 In the end they decide to see if they could convince him the Bus is haunted. "It'll be pretty easy to create unexplained noises and movements," Fitz says. 

"But Tripp isn't the superstitious type," Simmons says. 

"Yeah but I bet it doesn't take that much to wind him up," Skye suggests. "All you agents are pretty high-strung anyway."

"You're one of us." 

"I know. Do you see these wrinkles?"

"So you're going to make a secret agent, who is already trained to be suspicious, paranoid to be in his own flying base?" Simmons looks at them with her hands outstretched, as if saying "Do you see all the stupid you just made? Do you?" 

"It'll be fine." Fitz brushes it off. "He'll probably think it's funny." 

They begin Operation Ghost Hunter immediately. At first Skye and Fitz are disappointed with the lack of reaction from the cool agent, but they remind each other that this is a long-term game, and only fools rush in. 

After two weeks it finally seems to be working. Tripp keeps looking at the ceiling searchingly, glancing into dark rooms to check if they're clear. But before Skye and Fitz can congratulate themselves on a job well done, May discovers an actual undercover Hydra agent hiding in the plane ventilation system. Tripp never believed in the ghost stories, but he did help apprehend a potential threat. 

Simmons chooses to stay neutral in the whole affair. She never takes part in the prank, but she never tells either. Besides the fact that it really was a truly stupid idea, she's more uncomfortable with the idea of teaming up with Fitz against Tripp. It has the potential to reveal where her true loyalties lie, even though she might be the only one who isn't sure. Tripp had treated her with a friendly affection since Fitz returned to the Bus, but nothing more. She wants to find him, tell him that it's not what he thinks, that he is way, _way_ more her type... but she can't.

And she knows it's not for lack of courage.


	4. Steps

It's finally happening. A real-life James Bond mission. Black tie, fancy dress, champagne in crystal glasses that shine like diamonds. Dashing strangers, dancing, and danger mounting with every moment. 

And Jemma Simmons is on the bus. Of course. 

She's not the only one. Fitz is here. May too, although she's in the cockpit, probably meditating until they need her. Coulson and Skye are the lucky ones in the monkey suit and strapless bra. Tripp is near by, ready for back-up.

Despite the fact that this is a crucial mission where every second counts and nothing can go wrong, Jemma has enough latent energy to power a small village. Because, let's face it, EVERY mission is crucial, the seconds always count, and since when was S.H.E.I.L.D. okay with the occasional slip up? 

She listens to the sound coming from the communication speakers, polite laughter and live music played by a jazz quartet, and she sighs. It's been a long time since she's been to a party. 

"Could you stop sighing?" Fitz glares down at his extra-long tweezers currently holding a black computer chip. She knows he's glaring at her in his mind. "I'm trying to fix the circuit board on Grumpy and he's being-"

"Disagreeable?"

He scowls. She smirks. He returns to his circuit board. "I don't know what you're all worked up over anyway. It's not like you've never been to a gala before."

"Yes, but that was ages ago!"

"They're not even that fun. Just a bunch of people asking you about your research even though they don't understand it." 

"The music is nice and there are all those beautiful looking people."

"They looked pretty uncomfortable to me."

"It's not that bad!"

"Says the girl who spent an entire evening complaining to me that that stupid blue dress was making it hard for her to walk."

His eye catches hers, and in that entirely too quiet moment Simmons can't help but wonder if he remembers what she looked like in that dress. But he snatches his gaze away, and she thinks that she was being vain.

Suddenly the music swells over the intercom. Simmons groans with frustration. "Aw, and now they'll be starting the dancing!"

"You can't even dance."

"Excuse you," Simmons corrects him. "I absolutely dance."

The engineer rolls his eyes. "No you don't," Fitz says. "Not once at any of those parties we went to did you dance."

"Just because I didn't dance doesn't mean I don't. Besides, I don't remember you cutting any rugs in our academy days."

"First of all, cutting a rug? Second, I was too busy getting funding for our research," he explains as a matter of fact. 

Simmons snorts. "Please, if anyone was fundraising, it was me. You stood next to me eating hors d'oeuvres the entire evening."

Fitz firmly places his instruments on the lab table. "Alright fine. Let's do it."

"Do what?" 

"Dance."

"What, now?"

"Well you're not going to shut up about it." 

"Can you even dance?" 

"Of course I can. Come on." He positions himself in the area between the lab tables, poses with both hands in the air. "Show me what you're made of." 

Jemma stares at him for a moment before jumping off her stool. "Fine." She stands in front of him and places one hand in his, the other on his shoulder. It shocks her a little when he puts his other hand on her waist, and she realizes how close they actually are when he starts counting. "One, two, three, four, two, two, three, four.." And they're off, small steps between the tables of their little lab. 

It turns out they're both pretty bad at this, and there are plenty of comments at first.

"What are you doing?"

"No, no, my foot goes here, yours goes there."

"Why the hell is this so hard? We were top of our class for god's sake."

"Stop laughing, I'm trying to concentrate."  

While it doesn't get prettier, it gets easier. They stop stepping on each other and start moving in a fashion that resembles rhythm. She keeps laughing at the faces he makes when he's trying to go with the counts, and he keeps teasing her when she trips.  

Somewhere between the jokes and the giddy feeling in her stomach comes elation. They quickly gain confidence in their own mediocre moves, spinning and fancy foot work that's really just fancy shuffling. It's alright though, because they're just being stupid, and how many times have they been stupid around each other? Half of their brilliant ideas come from moments of stupidity like this.  Like that time she and Fitz tried to grow an apple tree that tasted like oranges, or the time they'd stayed up all night talking about Chitauri technology and the impact it would have on their research ("Alien cars that you drive with your brain!" "A suit with the capabilities of an entire space station!" "Chitauri Cheerios!")

But just like that she was back in the hanger, wind whipping at her tear-stained face as she saw Fitz frantically tugging at the lab door. She was back in a box in the middle of the ocean and Fitz was telling her "Yeah, you're more than that," and she was hugging him and kissing him and his lips barely touched her jaw-

And without thinking she's back in the lab, dancing with her best friend in the world, and she kisses him on the cheek. 

When she pulls back Fitz looks like she just dropped a bomb on him. "Oh god Fitz, I'm so sorry-"

But he's not listening, because he's somewhere else, ninety meters below sea level, and he's starting to piece something together. "Jemma?" His voice is quiet and uncertain, oh god what is she going to do?

"FitzSimmons! We need a report!" the speaker yells. The two scientists jerk back from each other and stare at the intercom. "FitzSimmons!" Coulson's voice barks. "Now!"

"Right!" Simmons says, and they're back in battle mode, two parts in a seemingly flawless machine. 

At the end of the night, when they're all safe and exhausted, Simmons passes by his room. "Good night," she whispers, but he doesn't seem to hear. She nods to herself and turns away when he says something. 

"Jemma, did something happen in the box?"  

Her stomach, figuratively of course, drops straight into her toes. Now was it, now is the time. Now she can put those nagging thoughts to rest.  

 _He would have died for you._  
_He loves you.  
_ _Do you love him?_

"You saved the day," she says. "That's all."

\--------

The next morning Simmons is up earlier than normal. She wants to get to work. It relaxes her, helps her to think more clearly. She dresses herself and walks quietly through the common room, a mug of coffee in her hand. 

"Nice dancing."

Jemma's coffee sloshes on to the floor. "Agent May! I didn't see you there!"

May gets that a lot, too often to dignify it with a response. Instead she continues her exercises, slowly moving through her space with precision. She keeps Simmons waiting for another moment, a deep breath, then a statement.

"You don't owe him anything." 

It takes a moment before Simmons' mouth catches up with her brain. "I'm sorry, I don't understand."

"Friends don't keep score. Neither do lovers. Agent Fitz knows that." 

It's too early for this. She must be dreaming. "Why-?"

"I'm meditating on the concept of balance this morning." She says this like it's the only explanation Simmons needs. It's certainly the only one she's going to get.  


	5. The Big Finish

The last few days have been hard on Fitz. The headaches from the time in the hospital have returned. To compound the problem his prosthetic arm has been misbehaving. Little involuntary twitches, slow reaction time. She wants to take a look at it, but he insists he can handle this one himself. One day he accidentally crushes a tablet without thinking. He yells some obscenities she hasn't ever heard him use when he's sober and chucks the broken tablet against the lab window so hard it cracks.    
  
"Fitz!"  
  
He's gone though, stomping towards his bunk with a red face.   
  
"What the hell was that?" Coulson stands at the back entrance, Tripp behind him staring at the window with a look of admiration.   
  
"It's Fitz sir. His arm has been malfunctioning and he's having a hard time adjusting."  
  
Director Coulson scowls. "Fix it. Soon," he says, but the lines around his mouth soften for just a moment. "We don't have the same insurance we used to."  
  
Simmons nods and bends down to clean up the mess. Tripp joins her, picking up little pieces of glass. "Are you alright?"  
  
Simmons nods, but it feels like she's holding her breath. "I'm fine. It was just- unexpected." She settles on that last word, because it's only later that she realizes the words she should have used were "deeply unsettling."  
  
"I'll talk to him."  
  
"What? No, I really don't think that's a good idea-"   
  
"Don't worry about it."  
  
"But he's being extremely irrational right now, I've never seen him react like that-"   
  
"I told you," Tripp says. "Don't worry about it."  
  
Of course she worries about it. She's Jemma Simmons for goodness sake, she likes having things a certain way at certain times. For instance, she likes waking up at 6:00, having breakfast at 7:00, being with Fitz in the lab from 8:00 to 18:00, excluding an hour long lunch break at 12:00 if they're not otherwise absorbed. She likes it this way because she encounters a problem, like fine tuning the response timing on the synthetic skin suit they've been developing as pseudo invisible uniforms, she had someone to bounce ideas off of.   
  
As it is she closes up shop at 15:00 to retreat to the kitchen, where she can drink hot tea and just not think about today for five minutes.   
  
"Knock, knock." Skye enters, looking at her sideways as though she's asking permission to come into Jemma's private space. Which is absurd, since the kitchen is a common area, she has just as much right to be there as Simmons does. "So... Fitz sure did a number on that window huh?"  
  
"It wasn't him, it was his arm," Simmons corrects.   
  
"Well if that's true he's got a great career in the Brooklyn Dodgers ahead of him."   
  
"Fitz? On an American baseball team?" The bio-chemist laughs. "He flinches if you throw a pen at him."  
  
Skye sits across from her friend. "I don't know about that. I just saw Tripp working him out on the punching bag downstairs."   
  
Simmons frowns. It makes sense that Tripp would recommend some form of exercise as a method of relieving tension. Any sorority girl with a VCR in the nineties knows that exercise gives you endorphins, which in turn makes you more relaxed. "But Fitz is more of a runner."   
  
The hacker shrugs. "Punching stuff is way more therapeutic, trust me."   
  
Simmons considers it. Punching something did sound really good right now.   
  
"So um, not to be all sixth grade-" Skye glances at Jemma. "Twelve. A twelve year old girl."   
  
"Oh. That's right."  
  
"Anyway. I heard Fitz tell Tripp that he thinks you're hiding something from him."   
   
The sound of the plane engines suddenly seems very loud.   
  
Skye adjusts herself in her chair. "So... Are you?"  
  
Simmons had had girl friends before, during primary school. It didn't last long of course; as soon as they realized just how intelligent she was her parents sent her to a prodigious private school. The students there brought a whole new meaning to the word "competitive," so it wasn't until she entered her first PhD program that Simmons was able to make friends like a normal human being. Of course that friend had been Fitz, so she was probably stretching the definition of normal just a bit.   
  
Still, this experience of having a girl friend... it's new. Wonderful really. She's never realized how wonderful it actually is until she's sitting across from her friend, everything laid out on the table, with some bonus emotional reactions she didn't even know were there. And Skye doesn't judge her, she doesn't react, she just respects Simmons emotional turmoil because dammit what girl hasn't cried about a boy in her life?   
  
But Skye does have an opinion.   
  
"Simmons, you have to tell him."  
  
"I know."  
  
"The boy is having migraines because his memories are trying to resurface. He might have a Terminator arm that's just waiting for his brain to shut down so it can take over!"  
  
"I- first of all, Fitz's arm is a highly developed prosthetic, not an A.I.-"  
  
"Simmons!"  
  
"I know! It's just complicated..."  
  
"How is it complicated?"  
  
"He would have died for me," Simmons says. "How am I supposed to respond to that?"  
  
Skye scoffs. "So what? You would have done the same for him. You have done the same for him actually, now that I think about it," she says.   
  
"That was different."  
  
"Uh, no it wasn't. Dying for someone you love isn't any more noble than dying for someone you love love. You still end up dead."  
  
Simmons gapes at her friend. "How is this that simple to you?"  
  
Skye looks dead into her eyes. "Look, just because he loves you doesn't mean you have to love him back."   
  
And it suddenly occurs to Simmons what Agent May was saying to her.   
  
"Oh." _I don't owe him._  
  
For a brief shining moment the guilt clears, and for the first time in weeks she knows her own mind. The whole world, and everyone's place in it, clicks into place.  

She's been looking at it all wrong. She knows she'd still die for him, but that doesn't mean she loves him. Death is not the determining factor of their relationship.   
  
The determining factor is Life, the life that's so much better when he's around, the life that's better when they're together, FitzSimmons in the give and take of making something so much better than what they could make separately-       
  
And there it is. What was once a theory is now a fact: everything else is negotiable.   
  
She's so absorbed by this new discovery that she doesn't even notice Skye is still talking. "I mean if you do love him you're gonna have to work around the whole no dating policy they have here. Of course Phil's in charge of S.H.I.E.L.D. now, so he'll probably give you a pass..."  
  
No, wait. Her earlier statement is false. She does owe him one thing. "Skye I have to go."  
  
"Oh! Okay, yeah, you- go..." Skye sighs and looks at the empty seat in front of her. "Crazy kids."  
  
\----  
  
Fitz barely even opens his bunk door before Simmons charges inside. "I've figured it out!" she announces. She turns to face the engineer who's still standing by his door, his hair wet from a recent shower. His mollified expression dampens her enthusiasm for a moment, and she composes herself. This isn't exactly like telling him she'd found a cure for cancer, which would be a cause for unbridled celebration. This requires more finesse. "You should probably sit down," she says, indicating his unmade bed.   
  
He raises an eyebrow. "If this is about my arm, can it wait until tomorrow? I'm about to pass out here-"  
  
"It's not your arm," Jemma says. "Please. Leo. Sit."   
  
It's the uncharacteristic use of his first name that does it. She hasn't called him that in years, not since they started at the Academy.   
  
She sits next to him on the bed on his bad side, the side with his mechanical arm. He looks exhausted, but this really can't wait. She's already put it off too long. "I need to admit something," she says. "But I need you to promise to wait until I'm finished before you respond. Promise?"  
   
"Yeah, sure," he says.   
  
She takes a deep breath. Remember the facts. Everything else is negotiable. "When we were... trapped... you told me something. Something that you didn't seem to remember until recently."  
  
He knows what's coming. She can tell by the way he sets his jaw, how his eyes darken. He stares at the floor.   
  
"You told me that you thought of me as more than a friend. And I didn't tell you this because-"  
  
"You don't feel the same way," he says, more to his feet than to her.   
  
"No! I didn't tell you because I didn't know how I felt, and I was afraid to tell you until I did. But I was wrong." She takes a deep breath. "I'm sorry I lied to you. I had no right to keep that information from you, because it's your memory as much as it is mine. I should have been a good friend and helped you from the start."  
  
He surprises her by laughing, although it's a humorless one. "Here I was wondering if I'd ever get up the nerve to tell you, and it turns out I already did." He sniffles. "It explains the déjà vu."  
  
"Fitz, I'm not done."  
  
Now she has his full attention. She takes both of his hands in hers, kneading his palms with her thumbs. She can feel the muscles in his right hand just as easily as she can feel the smooth metal interior in his left. Bio-chem and engineering. Of course.

"I told you that you are my best friend in the world." Oh god, is she going to cry? She always was a crier. "But you are also definitely, irrefutably more than that. You... you've always pushed me to be better, because you know I can be, and I- I've pushed you right back. But we've also been there for each other, and lately we keep trying to die for one another, which is just stupid and frustrating and..."   
  
Fitz gives a thick laugh, and she knows he's probably tearing up as well. Honestly, look at them, rambling and crying. What a pair.  
  
"Sorry. Let me start again." She takes a deep breath, straightens her back, and looks him in the eyes with a serious anxiousness that matches his own. "Life is about growth Fitz. And if I'm going to grow then I know you're the only one I want to grow with."   
  
There, she said it. And now- That is by far the stupidest most adorable grin she's ever seen in her life. She can't help but laugh at him.   
  
Fitz doesn't seem to care. "So what does this mean?"   
  
"What does it mean? It means I love you, moron."  
  
"No, I got that," he laughs. "I mean, for us. What are we going to do now?"   
  
"Oh! I have no idea. I mean, we're not even technically supposed to be dating. Although Skye did bring up a good point about Agent Coulson being the director-"  
  
"You know, I don't actually care that much." 

"Me neither."  
  
As far as kisses go, Jemma didn't fool herself: it's not exactly earth shattering. Kisses never are at first. Yet practice makes perfect, and by the next day while it still isn't pretty, she also realizes that nothing has ever been easier. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you guys enjoyed this. I've certainly enjoyed talking to everyone on here and sharing my love of FitzSimmons!
> 
> Also! I can believe I forgot to say this, but the idea of Simmons calling Fitz by his given name BEFORE the Academy (that I really only made a brief allusion to) is actually a head cannon belonging to a fellow fanfiction author going by Anytha, specifically her story "Tis the Season to Be Jolly." So yeah, not trying to steal anyone's thunder. :)


End file.
